Fed up with Congress, Trump whacks Obamacare with his pen

An executive order is expected to encourage creation of skimpy, cheaper plans that would take healthier enrollees from Obamacare.

By ADAM CANCRYN 10/12/2017 05:01 AM EDT

President Donald Trump is trying to do with the stroke of a pen what Republicans in Congress could not — bring about the end of the Obamacare markets.

Trump is expected to sign an executive order on Thursday directing an overhaul of major federal regulations that would encourage the rise of a raft of cheap, loosely regulated health insurance plans that don't have to comply with certain Obamacare consumer protections and benefit rules. They'd attract younger and healthier people — leaving older and sicker ones in the Obamacare markets facing higher and higher costs.

It's not yet clear how far the administration will go, or how quickly it can implement the president's order. But if successful, the new rules could upend the way businesses and individuals buy coverage — lowering premiums for the healthiest Americans at the expense of key consumer protections and potentially tipping the Obamacare markets into a tailspin.

"Within a year, this would kill the market," said Karen Pollitz, a senior fellow at the Kaiser Family Foundation who previously worked at former President Barack Obama’s HHS Department.

4. Read between the lines on this one. This will be in the courts for years.

10. Town hall meetings

helped bring down congresses obsession with killing obama care.
Maybe, after the liberal media machine gets wound up on this,
the people will become enraged enough to look at different
people in washington.

7. Every President

8. I know. I was a 30+ year fed

The issue is that Executive Orders are only supposed to direct how federal agencies will carry out an existing law (guidance). It is not supposed to undermine the law. Which is why whatever his minions have drafted, will go to court.

6. The White Supremacist Terrorist is getting a taste for murder.

9. This subject is confusing to me

Didn't 4 or 5 states already try to offer insurance policies to its residents across state lines? I recall that those states had zero insurers take them up on the offer.
It seems to me that there are a lot of logistics involved. Aren't insurers going to have set up networks of doctors and hospitals in different states? Aren't the state insurance commissions going to have to issue waivers so that these new insurers are allowed to sell worthless, junk insurance?

Is the plan to allow someone in Pa. to buy a junk insurance plan from an out of state insurer but won't he have to travel to Kansas to get treated by an in-network doctor?

I don't think an EO automatically changes the system, someone help me understand.

12. Everything he does is about those FAT tax cuts he wants for the richest of the rich....

Raping every program he can think of for cash is his battle plan and the ACA is his biggy. He wants that program burnt to the ground and bag the ashes. Take those billions of $$$ no longer spent on something as "frivolous" as health care subsidies and transfer them to Trump,Koch brothers,the Walton spawn,the COX family etc,etc,etc.....

16. My wife is in very poor health

She has diabetes that went undiagnosed and untreated for too long, because we spent a decade without health insurance. This has given her problems with her vision (the opthalmologist hopes he can preserve the vision in her left eye -- the right is pretty much hopeless), congestive heart failure and kidney problems. Now she has been diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (AKA Lou Gehrig's disease), which has her confined to a wheelchair. Our lives revolve around her doctor's appointments.

We NEED health insurance. Fearless Leader would take it away. I might as well declare bankruptcy now.

17. The Deplorables are going to have an All New Thing to blame on Obama

Folks, the Deplorables are blaming the government's response to Hurricane Katrina on Obama, who was the Junior Senator from Illinois in 2005. So, it's only right (in their eyes, at least) they should blame this on him too.

I have said this for quite some time: Selling health insurance across state lines is not a good thing.

We have a very good and very relevant example of what happens when you allow something like this: the credit card industry. Federal law says when a federally-chartered bank in one state makes a loan to a borrower in another state, the laws of the state the bank is in control the loan.

How we got in the trouble we are in now is because, many years ago, South Dakota's usury rate was killing the state. They had a really low one, and the LIBOR* was higher than the usury rate. The banks couldn't afford to make loans because they would have to pay more to borrow the money they were loaning to you than they could legally charge you to rent it.

If one of us were governor of South Dakota at the time, we would have written a usury rate that would be fair to everyone: for non-credit card debt, LIBOR plus 2 percent as of 9am on the day the loan is granted, and for credit cards, LIBOR plus 4 percent as of 9am on the first business day of the month, and that rate holds until the first business day of the next month. Instead, the credit card companies got the governor's ear: revoke your usury rate and we'll move the entire credit card industry to South Dakota. He did and they did, and now we're all getting done.

(Elect me president in 2020, and I will create a national usury rate. It would be completely constitutional because credit cards are now an article of interstate commerce. I will also work to get rid of the four things that are most damaging America: the House and Senate Democratic and Republican Caucuses.)

So let's apply this to health insurance. Why, you may ask, do insurers in different states charge different rates? The answer is as plain as the orange nose on Donald Trump's face: because people in different states require different amounts of healthcare. We will pick two states out of a hat: Hawaii and West Virginia. One of the few things that's cheaper in Hawaii than the rest of the country is health insurance, and for good reason: Hawaiians have very healthy lifestyles. They eat lots of fruits, vegetables and rice and a relatively low amount of saturated fats, they don't smoke much, their leisure activities are mostly outdoors, their industry is farming and the weather is beautiful. All tolled, a recipe for a healthy life. West Virginia is different in almost every way: they eat like shit, their weather sucks, their industry is coal mining and they're born with a lit cigarette in their hand. The people in WV look at Hawaiian insurance rates and think, "how nice it would be to pay Hawaiian insurance rates!" Problem is, if West Virginians paid Hawaiian insurance rates, but kept getting sick at West Virginia rates, the insurers would go broke tout suite. Insurance companies aren't stupid. They know if it's legal to BUY health insurance across state lines it's also legal to SELL it that way, and every health insurer in the country would haul ass for West Virginia.

* The London Interbank Offered Rate is the rate banks pay to borrow money from other banks.